Mobile Suit Gundam made its way to Sony’s show floor in a barebones sort of way. This game in particular allowed for more than just testing the short demo itself, but seeing what parts of the controller had been improved. As you may or may not know, the controller’s regular two analog sticks’ resolution had been increased from 8 bit to 10 bit. Basically, meaning they are more sensitive — the extra sensitivity helped out tremendously in the demo.

Mobile Suit Gundam’s camera is placed in an over-the-shoulder view. Though the Gundam takes up a little bit more of the screen than it probably should (about half), the Gundam model looks very nice. Even the enemy Mobile Suits looked cool; the only thing that really sucked about the game in terms of graphics was everything else. They plop you down in a desolate mountain desert and let you blow up six enemy Leos and a couple of guard towers. Hoorayyyy… however, I did enjoy the little bit that was offered. Regular movement was a bit slower than it probably should have been, and made it harder to actually put your laser sword to any good use.

The main weapons I used were the machine gun and the head Vulcans (machine guns in the head). It didn’t take too long to defeat enemies. If you happen to actually get damaged enough during the demo (aka you suck at games and probably life) body parts will start to fall off, disallowing use of certain weaponry or abilities. I hadn’t figured it out until my last play-through of the demo, but you can boost while on the ground, allowing you to move a lot faster and not rely solely on sprinting on foot towards your enemies. The boost also allows you to jump to get to higher places but when you land it takes a second or two for your Gundam to recover.

To me, it was weird to see such a barebones demo for Mobile Suit Gundam out on the show floor when there was the Xbox 360 counterpart Mobile Ops: One Year War practically finished already. For what its worth, though, the PS3 version did look noticeably better.